The Fire of India Poetics, Translation and Imitation in the Indian mas̲navīs of ʿĀqil Khān ‘Rāzī’

Abstract

ʿĀqil Khān ‘Rāzī’ (c. 1026-1108 AH, c. 1617-1696 AD) is a seventeenth-century Indo-Persian poet, historian and statesman who authored a dīvān, some mystical treatises, a historical chronicle and a number of mas̲navīs. This paper focuses on two of his mas̲navīs, Mihr-u māh (1065 AH, 1654/55 AD) and Shamʿ-u parvāna (1064 AH, 1658/59 AD), which are adaptations/translations in Persian of two Neo-Indo-Aryan narrative poems written in Awadhī during the sixteenth century. The aim is to understand how ʿĀqil Khān adapted/translated these two South Asian texts in Persian. In order to achieve this objective, this study concentrates on the imagery of fire in the prologues and in the conclusions of the compositions. The intertextual elements are analysed, unveiling the literary process devised by ʿĀqil Khān ‘Rāzī’ to compose a complex layered text that could be enjoyed by the multilingual readership of seventeenth-century South Asia.